Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The World, According To Me

I've been busy. That is why
I haven't been blogging over the last six months. Ironically, my
busy-ness has consisted of me scrambling to find ways to become less
busy while still paying the bills. At my last office job, I found
myself being worked a bit too hard for my liking (they wanted me to
be available between 50 and 60 hours a week). So I've been teaching
a bit and trying to freelance. And I've been exploring ways to lower
my “burn rate.” It's the teaching and the scrambling to
freelance that has been keeping me busy.

My abstinence from blogging
has made me aware of the divide that exists between those who have a
powerful voice in our society and those who have no real voice.
Being a blogger, by the way, does not automatically grant a powerful
voice to a blogger. After all, I have to admit that there are
probably not that many people who read my blog. Even
as an active blogger, therefore, my voice has been very small. But
having taken my place for a few months among those who have no voice,
I have been observing how much effort, how much money and how many
words have been expended by those whose voices are
powerful. All that effort and all those words have been expended in
order to inculcate in ordinary people a world view that just happens
to be convenient for those with powerful voices. I thought it might
be good to let these people know just how an ordinary person without
a voice views the world, so that they can see whether they have been
wasting their time and money. I can't speak for all ordinary people,
but I will speak for myself.

To sum up what the people
with powerful voices have been saying, I think they've been trying to
convince ordinary people that the United States is still a first-rate
nation, that the U.S. is the blameless and pure defender of freedom
and democracy, that we still live in a world of abundance
un-threatened by shortage of any kind, that the “free market” can
be trusted to distribute said abundance to any and all who are worthy
of it, and that our mad scramble for material abundance is having no
effect on the earth. The most pressing thing that ordinary Americans
should worry about, therefore, is which teen star is getting
divorced.

If this is what the
loud-voiced have been trying to communicate, I'm afraid they haven't
succeeded with me. The disconnect between their message and my
world-view can be summed up under four general headings: oil,
geopolitics, climate change, and economics. There is also a fifth
heading, which I call “the proliferation of sheep dogs.”

Oil

A lot of well-placed people
have been insisting over the last year that Peak Oil is a fallacy,
and that the world has plenty of hydrocarbon resources to last for
several decades more. Even people who pretend to be members of the
counterculture have said things like this. (See, for instance, what
George
Monbiot and Noam
Chomsky have been saying.) For me, however, the Bible on Peak
Oil has been the 2007 Oil Report, titled, “Crude Oil – The Supply
Outlook” from the Energy Watch Group of Germany. That report
made a number of bald, blunt statements and predictions: first, that
global oil production peaked in 2006; second, that global oil
production would experience steep declines post-Peak, and third, that
the steepness of the declines can be quantified (for instance, the
authors asserted that production would decline from a 2006 high of 86
million barrels per day to 58 million barrels per day in 2020).

I like predictions and
statements like this, because it's easy to tell whether the predictor
is right or wrong, and you don't have to wait very long before
finding out. (Which is easier to verify – a predictor telling you
that you will meet someone famous at some time in your life, or a
predictor telling you that you will meet Genghis Khan and his Mongol
army tomorrow morning at ten?) I believe the Energy Watch Group
report. I believe it because, from 2007 until now, the world has
been acting as if the report's predictions are true. Everything that
has happened from 2007 to now makes perfect sense when viewed through
the lens of those predictions, from the oil price spike and economic
crash of 2008 to the slow bleeding economic death of the West and the
OECD at present (and the frantic attempts to rob oil-producing
countries like Syria and Iran by means of “regime change”).

That means that an ordinary
person like me regards as liars those people who deny that we are
living post-Peak. This includes people who made a name for
themselves writing for sites like The
Oil Drum and who are now writing articles claiming that global
oil production is still growing, albeit slowly. Whenever someone
posts an article like that on the Web, they are wasting their breath
(and keystrokes) as far as I'm concerned, because I'm not going to
read what they write. I also regard as suspect those articles which
dismiss the peak of conventional crude production by pointing to
steady levels of “total liquids” production. (Just such an
article appeared here,
of all places. Suffice it to say that the production of many of
these “liquids” yields either a very poor positive return or an
actual negative return on energy invested.)

Geopolitics

The decline of the energy
resource base of the industrial world has, of course, led to a mad
scramble for the world's remaining energy resources. This is
paralleled by the scramble for the other raw materials needed by a
modern industrial society. This is the reason why Syria has been
branded a rogue regime, and the reason why the West has instigated
and is financing the insurgency against the Syrian government. This
is also the reason why the West is trying to destabilize Iran.

I normally don't save
newspapers, but I have a copy of the Oregonian from 2007 in
which there is an article describing a 2007 National Intelligence
Estimate of the Iranian nuclear program. In the view of the U.S.
intelligence community, there was no evidence that Iran
was trying to build a nuclear weapon. Therefore, anyone who writes
an article claiming that Iran must be prevented from building nuclear
weapons is regarded as a liar by an ordinary person like me, along
with people who say that we have a moral obligation to remove Hafez
Assad from power in Syria, or those who say that the 10,000 well-fed
American troops who went to Haiti after their most recent earthquake
were sent to help the Haitians, or those “compassionate
conservatives” who insist that America has a “responsibility
to protect” the citizens of other nations from using their
resources as they see fit.

Climate Change

Need I say anything about
this? Many well-funded voices in America, both secular and
religious, have insisted that climate change is a hoax by the liberal
Left who “hate our freedoms!” and want to hinder the prosperity
promised by free market capitalism.

To those who have said such
things, I have a question: How do you like our summer so far? Have
any of you keeled over from heat stroke? How many of you have lost
your homes to wildfires so far? How many of you will be starving due
to crop failures? I'd like to weep for you all, but the heat has
dried up my tears.

I'm struck by something the
Governor of Oklahoma said recently when questioned about the climate
change-induced drought gripping her state. She asked people to “pray
for rain.” Now, I am a Christian, and the Bible does command
Christians to pray for their needs. But I am a peculiar type of
Christian. I believe that the chief thing God wants to do with
Christians is to transform us into decent people. The main point of
our earthly lives is our moral development, not the satisfaction of
all our earthly cravings. Therefore, God frequently allows us to
suffer the consequences of our stupidity – in order to teach us a
lesson or two. In asking prayer for rain, this Republican ditz makes
it seem as if what Oklahoma is suffering is some supernatural
judgment, and not merely the natural consequence of ignoring very
simple physics and chemistry. (Let me ask you, if you play on the
freeway and get run over by a semi truck, was it due to a
supernatural act of God or your own stupidity?)

Unfortunately, I suspect
that Governor Mary Fallin's “request for prayer” will be typical
of the responses of a large majority of Americans to the age of
limits, as they chuck adult reasoning in favor of appeals to magic.

Economics (and Sheep
Dogs)

The loud voices which
dominate public discussion in our country are all preaching the same
message: namely, that the chief aim of our society must be to pursue
economic growth at all costs. Selfishness and greed are exalted
above all virtue, while frugality, community spirit and altruism are
demonized. Above all, the message has been that economic growth is
still possible, and that there are no structural, functional limits
to growth. Therefore, everyone can be rich if he wants to be, and
everyone should want to be.

By contrast, a
counterculture has arisen in the United States and other countries.
This counterculture recognizes that economic growth has ceased
throughout the industrial world, and that those things that look like
growth are merely zero-sum transfers of wealth from one group of
people to another by means of swindles. Many people within this
counterculture are able to accurately trace the reasons for the
cessation of growth to the decline of our resource base and the
pollution of our environment by economic activity.

However, a funny thing has
happened as certain members of this counterculture have become more
popular and have acquired powerful voices of their own. What has
happened as time has passed is that the message of these “powerful
voices” has changed to resemble the message of the mainstream which
this counterculture is supposed to oppose. In other words, the
supposedly countercultural voices have been turned into “sheep
dogs.”

Let me define the term
“sheep dog.” In a society dominated by privileged ruling elites,
there are certain people who become popular and well-known
spokespersons for those exploited and oppressed by the elites. These
spokespersons are tolerated as long as their popularity and influence
is not great enough to threaten the established order. However, once
they achieve a critical mass, both they and their message are usually
co-opted by the ruling elites in the hope and expectation that the
energy of both the spokespersons and their followers may be turned in
directions that are harmless to the ruling elites. They become the
sheep dogs of the elites. Sometimes these sheep dogs are
manufactured by the elites. (This process occurred in the ancient
Roman Empire, by the way. There's a book that describes the process
– I think the name of it is Subversive Virtue.)

Within the Peak Oil/climate
change/limits-aware counterculture, a fair number of sheep dogs have
arisen. I have time to mention only two just now. I think of Tom
Whipple, a retired CIA analyst whose first involvement in the
Peak Oil scene was commendable, in that he raised the issue in an
intelligent, easily understandable manner. But Tom has lately seemed
to run off the rails – on the one hand, foaming at the mouth about
how Syria and Iran are rogue states which must be overthrown, and on
the other hand, raving about how new breakthrough technologies like
cold
fusion will enable us to continue to lead an opulent life for
decades to come. (Earth to Tom: even if “cold fusion” was a
viable physical process (which it isn't), scaling up a fusion power
plant to produce the amounts of energy our society demands while
keeping the physical size of the plant at a reasonable scale would
quickly turn the “cold” fusion plant into a “hot” fusion
plant, with all the problems that entails.)

Then there's Jay
Taylor, a supposed finance “whiz” who hosts an Internet radio
program, “Turning Hard Times Into Good Times.” In his radio
show, he claims that he will guide you into keeping your money from
“Wall Street” by giving you information on stocks that's not
found in the “mainstream media.” He can show you how to grow
your money by smart investing, yadda yadda. According to Mr. Taylor,
America is in its present jam because we have let the Government get
too powerful, rather than letting the free market work its
wealth-creating magic.

(Earth to Jay Taylor: if you
claim that you're trying to keep me from being robbed by Wall Street,
why are you then telling me to invest in mining stocks? The age of
“investment” characterized by people getting something for
nothing merely by purchasing the right stocks is over. Our entire
debt-based economy is running off the rails. You are not the
counterculture. You sound just like the Wall Street Journal.)

Yes, indeed, that's what Jay
Taylor sounds like. (For that matter, even Max Keiser has lately
joined the cheerleaders of “free market” economics.) Such people
appeal to the greed of those members of the upper middle class who
seek to hold on desperately to unearned privileges and prerogatives.
To this class such people say, “Yes, the world is a dangerous place
and your wealth is under threat! Come here and we'll tell you how
you can guard all your stuff from the coming zombie apocalypse!
We're trustworthy; we're not the mainstream!” But I've got
something to say to anyone who claims to be countercultural, yet
allows himself to be interviewed by one of these bozos: Don't grant
them interviews anymore. But if you do, tell the rest of us exactly
when you start talking on the show and when you stop so we can skip
the ads for stocks and the free market rah-rah. Otherwise, people
like me may not bother listening to you anymore. My cat can beat up
your sheep dog.

A Word On Comments

Comments are always welcome. I am flattered by those who read, and gratified by those who comment (even though we may disagree). I only ask that comments be "family-friendly" - clean language, if you get my drift.

One other thing: all commenters must have an ID (Google ID or OpenID or something similar. Anonymous comments will not be published.

And lastly,... if you comment and your comment does not appear within 48 hours, please try again. Google Blogger has been acting up lately in not alerting me to commenters.